The biggest ratings shifts early in the 2020 college football season have not come from top teams playing big games -- they've come from teams being subtracted from the list, then added again. With the Big Ten announcing its late-October return, I've gone ahead and added those teams, with their preseason projections, back to the SP+ rankings below. If or when other conferences announce their return, they'll be thrown back into the pool as well.
Optically, this is going to be an awfully strange season. (That fits the general motif -- everything is weirder in 2020.) Only one of the top seven teams below has actually played a game, and three of them won't kick off for another month. It might be a good time to note, then, that your preseason projections are given heavy weight until you've played a few games and that, if you've played no games, your preseason rating remains.
It's also a good time to remind you that SP+ isn't a résumé rating. If your first reaction is, "How can Ohio State and Alabama be ranked ahead of Clemson when they haven't played anyone yet??" please keep that in mind.
What is SP+, then? In a single sentence, it's a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. I created the system at Football Outsiders in 2008, and as my experience with both college football and its stats has grown, I have made quite a few tweaks to the system. SP+ is intended to be predictive and forward-facing. That is important to remember. It is not a résumé ranking that gives credit for big wins or particularly brave scheduling -- no good predictive system is. It is simply a measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football. If you're lucky or unimpressive in a win, your rating will probably fall. If you're strong and unlucky in a loss, it will probably rise.
